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Posted by Peter Mansoor

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Presidential speechwriter and journalist Jonathan Horn, author of books on George Washington’s latter years in the 18th century and Confederate general Robert E. Lee in the 19th century, explores the 20th century with his latest work on the entwined lives of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur and Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright. It was their destiny to preside over the greatest defeat in U.S. military history in the Philippines as the United States was thrust into World War II following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

For MacArthur, recalled to Australia by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the setback was temporary. He would proceed to form a new command, the Southwest Pacific Area, or SWPA, and fight his way back through New Guinea to find redemption with his celebrated return to the Philippines. For Wainwright, the defeat on Bataan and Corregidor were the end of the road, with the remaining war years spent in prisoner of war camps. Both were awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest decoration the United States can bestow on service members engaged in combat.

Wainwright’s medal was justly deserved, albeit delayed until after the war by a petulant MacArthur, who was angered by Wainwright’s surrender of the entire Philippines after the fall of Corregidor. MacArthur’s medal, awarded to soften the blow of his forced withdrawal to Australia and to counter Japanese propaganda, was certainly not merited, at least in the traditional sense of actions above and beyond the call of duty.

MacArthur was the son of a celebrated American hero; his father Arthur MacArthur had earned his own Medal of Honor leading a Wisconsin regiment up Missionary Ridge during the Battle of Chattanooga in November 1863. The elder MacArthur would go on to lead troops again in battle on Luzon during the Spanish-American War and culminated his career as governor-general of the Philippines. His son Douglas spent those war years at West Point, graduating in 1903 at the top of his class both academically and in cadet rank. Wainwright, descended from a star-crossed military family (his father, a commander in the U.S. Navy, was killed by a Confederate musket ball in 1863, and his brother, a naval ensign, was killed by pirates off the coast of Mexico in 1902), graduated from the U.S. Military Academy three years later, also reaching the rank of first captain.

But if luck was essential to a military leader, and MacArthur certainly thought it was, MacArthur had it in spades, while Wainwright’s fate would be only slightly better than his two slain family members.

MacArthur earned his initial fame as one of the most decorated American soldiers in World War I. He would proceed to become the youngest major general in the Army, serving as the superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy and deploying for two additional tours in the Philippines before vaulting over numerous other general officers to become the U.S. Army chief of staff. But not without controversy: His attack on Great War bonus marchers in 1932 would sully his reputation with his former comrades in arms. MacArthur would finish his interwar years as a field marshal (a gaudy rank chosen by MacArthur himself) of the newly established Philippine Army before being recalled to active duty as commander of U.S. Army Forces in the Far East in the summer of 1941.

Wainwright’s path was more conventional. He was a supremely competent cavalryman, a dedicated disciple of a dying branch of service. Instead of entering the ranks of the newly created Armored Force, however, Wainwright headed in 1940 on orders to the Philippines, where he would command the U.S. Army Philippine Division and then the North Luzon Force, composed of several poorly trained and equipped Philippine Army divisions and the superb 26th Cavalry Regiment of Philippine Scouts. Not to worry, his boss MacArthur opined, the Japanese would not invade until April 1942 at the earliest. Not for the last time, MacArthur’s intelligence would be off by an order of magnitude.

Instead of relying on War Plan Orange, which envisioned the provisioning of the Bataan Peninsula and nearby island fortress of Corregidor for an extended siege, MacArthur ordered Wainwright’s troops to defend forward along the beaches of Lingayen Gulf. A well-trained and equipped corps might have been able to execute the new plan, but the North Luzon Force was anything but. As Japanese forces shattered his lines, Wainwright fought a delaying action back to Bataan, just as War Plan Orange had envisioned. But with one huge difference—the food required to sustain U.S. and Filipino forces in the peninsula had been positioned instead in the Luzon central plain to support the revised (and overly ambitious) plan. The Japanese captured most of the supplies, while Wainwright’s troops went on half rations as soon as they dug in on Bataan. There they fought courageously as their stamina slowly dwindled, their defeat only a matter of time.

MacArthur would not be present to witness the end. Ordered to Australia by the president, MacArthur, his family, and a small staff departed on PT boats in March 1942 on a harrowing journey to Mindanao, and from there by air to Darwin. Wainwright would hold as long as he could, which was April for Bataan and a month later for Corregidor and the rest of the Philippines. As Wainwright shuffled off to a prisoner of war camp, MacArthur built a new army and began the long journey back through the tortuous jungles of New Guinea.

MacArthur never forgave Wainwright for surrendering the entire Philippines to the Japanese, even though he had little choice in the matter. MacArthur’s anger was better directed at the War Department, but he made his displeasure clear by sabotaging the award of the Medal of Honor to Wainwright, who spent three-plus years in grueling conditions as a prisoner of war wondering whether he would be court martialed for the surrender of his command. He needn’t have worried. The War Department promoted him to full general while in captivity and after his release he was given a prominent place of honor on the USS Missouri at the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay, and he likewise was present at the Japanese surrender in the Philippines. Wainwright returned to the United States to massive parades in his honor. President Truman gave him the ultimate honor when he awarded Wainwright the Medal of Honor, long delayed by MacArthur’s pettiness.

By then MacArthur had moved on, famously wading ashore on Leyte on October 20, 1944, overseeing the liberation of Luzon in 1945, presiding over the Japanese surrender, and acting as the Allied viceroy in the occupation of postwar Japan. He had one more operational success in Korea during the Inchon invasion, but overreached due to poor intelligence (a habit in MacArthur’s commands), spurring Chinese intervention in the conflict. MacArthur’s disagreement with Truman administration policy led to his relief by a president much less willing to overlook his political missteps than was Roosevelt during World War II.

Horn’s research, much of it conducted in archives, is exceptional and his writing fluid and engaging. He has crafted a very personal account of two of America’s most celebrated heroes, one (MacArthur) who remains in the public imagination and another (Wainwright) who has been largely lost to time. This is a highly recommended account of their service to the nation, one that can be enjoyed by historians and lay readers alike.

The Fate of the Generals: MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines
by Jonathan Horn
Scribner, 427 pp., $30.99

Peter Mansoor is a retired U.S. Army colonel, the General Raymond E. Mason Jr. Chair in Military History at Ohio State University, and author of the forthcoming book Redemption: MacArthur and the Campaign for the Philippines (Cambridge University Press, August 2025).

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Posted by Victorino Matus

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A local corrections officer tells me prison breaks are not like in the movies. If it happens on your watch, "there's no slap on the wrist." You will be held accountable. The investigation will also seek ways to prevent future breakouts. I suggest a ban on large posters of Rita Hayworth.

But speaking of accountability, our Andrew Stiles reviews Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and his Disastrous Choice to Run Again.

"Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson are going to make a lot of money from their new book, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Some people find this aggravating, and for good reason. The vast majority of Americans (86 percent as of February 2024) used common sense to arrive at the correct conclusion long before the 81-year-old president shuffled on stage and bragged about beating Medicare. Biden was cognitively and physically unfit to serve another term in office. No shit. He was arguably unfit to serve at all. The scandal played out in plain sight, fueled by Democrats and mainstream journalists doing what they do best: scolding the American people for having the wrong opinions.

"'Our only agenda is to present the disturbing reality of what happened in the White House and the Democratic presidential campaign in 2023–2024,' the authors write in the introduction. It's a carefully worded admission that their goal is not to provide a full account of the cover-up of Biden's decline, because that would involve a thorough examination of how mainstream journalists, who don't officially work 'in the White House' or on behalf of Democratic campaigns (but often in practice), helped perpetuate the lies.

"Original Sin is an illuminating and often infuriating exposé. It's packed with damning accounts from (mostly anonymous) Democratic sources who all waited until after the election to stop lying. Numerous villains are identified: Biden himself, his family, his inner circle, and the Democratic establishment. Meanwhile, the reporters who failed to expose the scandal when the stakes were higher are generally portrayed as sympathetic, well-meaning professionals with poor bullshit detectors."

You know what's surprising? Just how close the British were to winning the Revolutionary War. Professor Allen C. Guelzo explains in his review of Rick Atkinson's The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780.

"It is one of Atkinson’s convictions in both The British Are Coming and The Fate of the Day that Britain and its leaders were, even with the keenest of intentions, their own worst enemies. Britain’s North American colonies emerged from the trauma of the Seven Years’ War as grateful and devoted children of the Hanoverian crown and its newest representative, George III. What the imperial planners in London never quite fathomed was that this reverence was built on generations of improvised self-government in America, which the Americans saw no reason to surrender once the British government decided to impose an unprecedented series of direct taxes on them. It was not that the taxes were necessarily onerous; it was that they were imposed roughshod, without a by-your-leave to American habits.

"It exploded when the Boston Tea Party turned to the outright destruction of property. No one was angered more seriously than the king, who insisted that unless the Americans were brought to heel, the rest of the empire—Ireland, India, and the Caribbean—would go the same way.

"The British generals to whom this task was given—Sir William Howe, Sir Henry Clinton, Earl Cornwallis, 'Gentlemanly Johnny' Burgoyne—were neither nitwits nor tyrants, and if we are to judge by the opening chapters of The Fate of the Day, they were remarkably close to winning their war in 1777. Burgoyne’s capture of Fort Ticonderoga in July 1777 should have guaranteed the success of his plan to move down the Hudson River Valley and cut off rebellious New England from the rest of the American rebel states; Howe’s dramatic combined-arms operation to capture Philadelphia steamrolled George Washington’s Continental Army at Brandywine in September, threw off a counterattack at Germantown in October, and consigned the Continentals to their dreadful winter encampment at Valley Forge.

"But Howe’s adventure to Philadelphia left him unable to support Burgoyne when 'Gentlemanly Johnny' was forced into surrender at Saratoga in October 1777. Howe himself had already concluded that the war was unwinnable and never lifted a finger to disturb Washington at Valley Forge. The Saratoga victory convinced the French that the British were vulnerable to a serious effort to recover France’s New World empire, and with the French entrance into the war, the principal theaters of operations had to be shifted elsewhere by Britain. Britain’s generals in America would still win a few dramatic victories, but they would lose the biggest battle at Yorktown in 1781, and after that, American independence only required the official stamp of the 1783 peace treaty."

Did you know Alexander Hamilton played a key role in the Battle of Yorktown? It's mentioned in Ron Chernow's eponymous bestseller. Chernow is now out with a new book, Mark Twain. Patrick Parr gives us a review.

"Twain lived a packed life. At 17, out of frustration toward [his brother] Orion and a desire for adventure, he left Hannibal for New York and Philadelphia, writing articles and taking printing jobs, exasperated by the explosion of immigrants. 'I always thought the eastern people were patterns of uprightness,' Twain wrote to Orion, 'but I never before saw so many whisky-swilling, God-despising heathens as I find in this part of the country.' Chernow also notes Twain’s evolving feelings over seeing black people free for the first time. Back then at least, Twain preferred talking with 'a good, old-fashioned negro' back in Missouri.

"Eventually, Twain went back to work for Orion, now married and living in Keokuk, Iowa. Chernow could have filled another thousand pages tracking Twain’s movements in his 20s; the printer/riverboat pilot/writer/pro-Confederacy militia soldier (for two weeks)/Nevada silver rush miner was in constant motion. Chernow notes 'early February 1863' as the time when the first 'Mark Twain' byline appeared in print. To Twain, the pseudonym, as Chernow puts it, 'was short and melodious—a perfect spondee.'

"By 31, Twain had slowed down… a little, and was looking for companionship. 'Beneath his ribald mockery,' Chernow writes, 'Twain was a suppressed romantic who needed a spotless soul to worship.' To describe Twain’s marriage to Olivia Langdon, or 'Livy,' Chernow again dives into archival correspondence, while also using long-ago efforts of Twain estate editor Dixon Wecter and his 1949 collection, The Love Letters of Mark Twain. The result is a sweeping, 34-year love story that somehow endured losing their first-born son Langdon at 19 months. Twain’s devotion to Livy is admirable, but more so was Livy’s patience and stamina. ... As far as Chernow documents, Twain was faithful to Livy, and when she passed in 1904, the then mega-famous writer was devastated, and for the last six years of his life, he appeared at times embittered and lost, his north star vanished."

The Weekend Beacon commemorates this Memorial Day with a review by Colonel Peter Mansoor (ret.) of Jonathan Horn's The Fate of the Generals: MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines.

"Instead of relying on War Plan Orange, which envisioned the provisioning of the Bataan Peninsula and nearby island fortress of Corregidor for an extended siege, MacArthur ordered Wainwright’s troops to defend forward along the beaches of Lingayen Gulf. A well-trained and equipped corps might have been able to execute the new plan, but the North Luzon Force was anything but. As Japanese forces shattered his lines, Wainwright fought a delaying action back to Bataan, just as War Plan Orange had envisioned. But with one huge difference—the food required to sustain U.S. and Filipino forces in the peninsula had been positioned instead in the Luzon central plain to support the revised (and overly ambitious) plan. The Japanese captured most of the supplies, while Wainwright’s troops went on half rations as soon as they dug in on Bataan. There they fought courageously as their stamina slowly dwindled, their defeat only a matter of time.

"MacArthur would not be present to witness the end. Ordered to Australia by the president, MacArthur, his family, and a small staff departed on PT boats in March 1942 on a harrowing journey to Mindanao, and from there by air to Darwin. Wainwright would hold as long as he could, which was April for Bataan and a month later for Corregidor and the rest of the Philippines. As Wainwright shuffled off to a prisoner of war camp, MacArthur built a new army and began the long journey back through the tortuous jungles of New Guinea.

"MacArthur never forgave Wainwright for surrendering the entire Philippines to the Japanese, even though he had little choice in the matter. MacArthur’s anger was better directed at the War Department, but he made his displeasure clear by sabotaging the award of the Medal of Honor to Wainwright, who spent three-plus years in grueling conditions as a prisoner of war wondering whether he would be court martialed for the surrender of his command. He needn’t have worried. The War Department promoted him to full general while in captivity and after his release he was given a prominent place of honor on the USS Missouri at the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay, and he likewise was present at the Japanese surrender in the Philippines. Wainwright returned to the United States to massive parades in his honor. President Truman gave him the ultimate honor when he awarded Wainwright the Medal of Honor, long delayed by MacArthur’s pettiness."

This review will be posted on Monday, May 26.

Happy Memorial Day.

Vic Matus
Arts & Culture Editor
Washington Free Beacon

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Posted by Allen C. Guelzo

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We have now arrived on the cusp of the 250th anniversary of American independence, and speaking as a veteran of the 1976 Bicentennial, the word that comes most readily to mind for the celebrations 50 years later is flaccid. The excuse which usually follows is that we live today in a sea of political hatred, retribution, and instability, which makes it hard to celebrate the events that made it all possible.

But it’s worth remembering that in 1976, we had also just passed through the final debacle of Vietnam the year before; had just witnessed the national agony of Richard Nixon and Watergate two years before; and were caught on the horns of an economic crisis so mystifying that New York City was one day away from declaring bankruptcy. Yet, we managed to throw a stupendous national party that featured Operation Sail, a state visit from Queen Elizabeth II, and a Bicentennial Wagon Train that crossed the entire continent—from Oregon to Philadelphia. Bliss it was to be an American that year, and to be young—or at least, as I was, a young tour guide in 18th-century "small clothes" and formal white wig—was very heaven.

Certainly, a major reason for today’s chillier atmosphere lies with the way we have written the history of the American Revolution in the last 50 years. Like much of American historiography, historians of the Revolutionary era have increasingly moved from the history of individuals and moments to the social history of long-term economic and cultural movements, and that means battles and generals figure in substantially less prominent ways.

Another reason for the subdued atmosphere in 2025 is the turn in popular history and teaching toward political pessimism about the Revolution itself. The opening essays of The 1619 Project, for instance, recast the Revolutionary era in more critical terms than the Bicentennial did. But they are the product of a time of diminished confidence in American institutions, and so it becomes easier to attach the same discounted enthusiasm to the Revolution.

Which is not to say that the older mode of great-men-and-great-battles has been completely cast aside. George Washington seems to be the subject, on average, of a new book every year. Kevin Weddle’s The Compleat Victory: Saratoga and the American Revolution (2021) is the finest military history ever written on a Revolutionary battle; Stacy Schiff’s The Revolutionary: Sam Adams (2022) drags out of the political shadows one of the most talented rabble-rousers American politics ever produced; and the dean of American Revolutionary historians, Gordon Wood, provides one of the most cogent summaries of the move to independence in Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution (2021).

Even America’s quondam enemies have harvested a fine crop of specialty biographies. Andrew Roberts’s remarkable 2021 biography of George III almost makes the "last king of America" likable; Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy presents us with a collective biography of 10 British generals in The Men Who Lost America (2014) who were certainly not the incompetent Colonel Blimps they have often been made out to be.

And then there is Rick Atkinson.

Atkinson made his first career in journalism, covering defense issues in the 1980s. In 1982, he snagged a Pulitzer for a series of stories on a Vietnam-devastated West Point class, stories which became his first book, The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point’s Class of 1966.

The success of The Long Gray Line created too great a temptation not to return to the same pump, and after leaving newspapers in 1999, he set to work on a massive narrative trilogy on the U.S. Army in the Second World War’s European theater, An Army at Dawn (2002), The Day of Battle (2007), and The Guns at Last Light (2013). It was from there that he took an even longer step back in time, to the American Revolution, with the first book in a new trilogy, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777, in 2019. The Fate of the Day, just released, is the second volume of Atkinson’s Revolutionary trilogy.

It is one of the conceits of journalism that reporters write "the first draft of history." It is one of the conceits of historians that we are likely to respond, "Yes, and that’s why historians are around to write the final draft and correct all the mistakes." The same, however, should not be said of Atkinson. He has the journalist’s stylistic flair but a stupendous appetite for research that would put many a gray-haired Ph.D. to shame. Even more, he has an admirable reserve of judgment which prevents him from rushing too far, too fast.

Above all, for this 250th anniversary, Atkinson loves the ins-and-outs of military planning, strategy, and tactics, not unmixed with a canny eye for the flow of politics and political personalities, whether in Philadelphia, London, or Versailles. (He is, after all, an Army brat, like myself.) The result, in The Fate of the Day, is a massive, and massively enjoyable, excursion into the embattled history of the American republic, its imperial British enemy, and its opportunistic ally, France.

It is one of Atkinson’s convictions in both The British Are Coming and The Fate of the Day that Britain and its leaders were, even with the keenest of intentions, their own worst enemies. Britain’s North American colonies emerged from the trauma of the Seven Years’ War as grateful and devoted children of the Hanoverian crown and its newest representative, George III. What the imperial planners in London never quite fathomed was that this reverence was built on generations of improvised self-government in America, which the Americans saw no reason to surrender once the British government decided to impose an unprecedented series of direct taxes on them. It was not that the taxes were necessarily onerous; it was that they were imposed roughshod, without a by-your-leave to American habits.

It exploded when the Boston Tea Party turned to the outright destruction of property. No one was angered more seriously than the king, who insisted that unless the Americans were brought to heel, the rest of the empire—Ireland, India, and the Caribbean—would go the same way.

The British generals to whom this task was given—Sir William Howe, Sir Henry Clinton, Earl Cornwallis, "Gentlemanly Johnny" Burgoyne—were neither nitwits nor tyrants, and if we are to judge by the opening chapters of The Fate of the Day, they were remarkably close to winning their war in 1777. Burgoyne’s capture of Fort Ticonderoga in July 1777 should have guaranteed the success of his plan to move down the Hudson River Valley and cut off rebellious New England from the rest of the American rebel states; Howe’s dramatic combined-arms operation to capture Philadelphia steamrolled George Washington’s Continental Army at Brandywine in September, threw off a counterattack at Germantown in October, and consigned the Continentals to their dreadful winter encampment at Valley Forge.

But Howe’s adventure to Philadelphia left him unable to support Burgoyne when "Gentlemanly Johnny" was forced into surrender at Saratoga in October 1777. Howe himself had already concluded that the war was unwinnable and never lifted a finger to disturb Washington at Valley Forge. The Saratoga victory convinced the French that the British were vulnerable to a serious effort to recover France’s New World empire, and with the French entrance into the war, the principal theaters of operations had to be shifted elsewhere by Britain. Britain’s generals in America would still win a few dramatic victories, but they would lose the biggest battle at Yorktown in 1781, and after that, American independence only required the official stamp of the 1783 peace treaty.

The Fate of the Day stretches from the high point of British military fortunes in America through a steady slide that even the British capture of Savannah in 1778 and Charleston in 1780 cannot reverse. If some of this conjures up faint echoes of a similar slide of military fortunes in Indochina almost two centuries later, that is probably not a misjudgment. Along the way, though, Atkinson wants us to see how much the Revolution worked a kind of political, military, and diplomatic alchemy in America. In a new republic plagued by bickering, we found strength out of the bickering. In a land of farmers, immigrants, and merchants, we found the most unlikely and marvelous leaders. In a crisis that gave plenty of excuse for replacing one monarchy with another, we found a general whose political reserve never allowed him to step across the line that would undo a republic (just as Cromwell undid the English republic more than a century before). Atkinson makes no secret of his frank admiration for Washington, and largely because Washington understood a single basic fact about his soldiers and his countrymen—that they must be reasoned with, not bludgeoned.

Given the shortness of time, we will probably not mount a celebration in 2026 that matches the raucous scale of 1976. But having in hand Rick Atkinson’s new trilogy—and especially The Fate of the Day—will be no small compensation.

The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780
by Rick Atkinson
Crown, 880 pp., $42

Allen C. Guelzo is the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar in the James Madison Program at Princeton University and a Non-Resident Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute.

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